ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of children in heritage discourse as placeholders of the future. It examines how this role exerts a domesticating force for the future, which twins with the rescuing of the past to avoid anxieties about the present. The chapter looks at how and why heritage uses the concept of ‘future generations’ in explaining the importance of our work. It critically discusses how this positions us in relation to children, and how transgenerational gifts can be burdens as well as assets. The chapter considers the work of sociologists such as M. Adams and C. Groves, and social psychologists such as S. Reicher, who have made considerable progress in understanding the role of future making in contemporary society. The anthropologist D. Miller has looked at the intergenerational relationships managed through gift-giving in his account of shopping in North London. He identifies thrift as an unquestionable virtue in his respondents, regardless of whether their budgets were restricted or not.
